High Ranking, Low DA & PA

[TP_Marketing]

I have some low competition words that I am trying to rank for, I have a competitor that is using similar words but outranking people with more links DA, and PA. How is this possible? I do see alot of people in our niche buying domain names that match exact keyword searches, with little or know backlinks ranking top 5.

Thank You

[TP_Marketing]

Is there anyway around the Exact keyword usage in the url?

EX- Searching for "jason aldean tickets" this site www.jasonaldeantickets.org shows up on page #1 among very high ranking sites that have been around a number of years. if you click on a link on the .org site to purchase inventory there is a 301 back to the main site, you can see the url/name changes. Is there anyway for google to eventually filter these out?

Thanks

[DougRoberts]

Without specifc examples it's hard to be specific.

Remember that the link profile (and DA/PA it provides) is only part of the equation. There are lots of other factors that search engines are going to take into account.

What is the relevance of the content? How good is the content that's ranking? What about freshness? Is it being updated regularly? Is there a lot of social engagement/comments etc?

Links are only part of the equation. You can find out more about ranking factors here:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

You might want to do a Full SERP analysis on the Keyword Difficulty tool to see how on-page/social might be affecting things.

Hope this helps!